


My Candle Burns at Both Ends

by cosmic_llin



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Internal Monologue, Mental Illness, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-06
Updated: 2010-07-06
Packaged: 2017-10-10 10:43:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_llin/pseuds/cosmic_llin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kathryn Janeway knows she works too hard, and she doesn't care.</p><p>Written for the July Drabblefest at Where No Woman, and inspired by the Edna St. Vincent Millay poem First Fig.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Candle Burns at Both Ends

**Author's Note:**

> My candle burns at both ends;  
> It will not last the night;  
> But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends---  
> It gives a lovely light!

They think I don't know the things they say about me sometimes. Of course I know. Being their captain is a little like being their mother, they can't have secrets from me.

Chakotay tries to be tactful about it. 'The crew worry about you,' he'll say, gently, over dinner. 'I worry about you. Don't you think you're working too hard?'

What he means is, we think you're going crazy.

I wonder sometimes myself it it's true. I've done some things I would have looked at five or six years ago and called crazy. I keep drawing lines for myself and then leaping merrily over them. There's a little part of me that watches from inside and knows that I'm not quite rational, not all the time, at least. I wonder if I can be trusted with the lives of so many people when I can't even really be trusted with my own.

But my crew believe in me, still. The captain can do it, they think. Just look at all the terrible situations she's gotten us out of before. Nothing can stop the captain.

But the unstoppable captain and the rational captain can't be the same woman. The crew chose this. They need this.

Sometimes I think about going to the Doctor, and telling him how I can't sleep more than a few hours a night, and how now and then I hear things that I know I can't be hearing, how a lot of the time I feel like I'm flying instead of walking around. But he'd relieve me of duty. It's not as though he hasn't already tried. And I love and respect Chakotay, but he doesn't have what it takes to get this crew home. I'm the only one who can do it.

I'm reckless. I'm foolish. One of these days it's going to get me killed. But until then, nothing can stop me.


End file.
